BERLIN: Germany warned on Friday, two days before a general election, that Russia has been targeting voters with a disinformation campaign seeking to help the far-right AfD and “destroy confidence in democracy”.

Security officials had reason to suspect the Kremlin-linked Storm-1516 network was behind some of the online campaigns, said interior ministry spokesman Maximilian Kall.

“The goal of these influence operations is to destroy confidence in democracy, to question the integrity of the electoral process,” he told a Berlin press conference. German security officials have long been raising the alarm about potential Russian-backed efforts to influence Sunday´s vote at a time of soaring tensions over the Ukraine war.

Kall said officials believe the campaigns were “quite targeted at the parliamentary elections” but did not have a “wide reach”. Kall stressed that “the free electoral process in Germany is guaranteed, and we will continue to promptly refute relevant misinformation”.

The aim of one campaign seeks to suggest the AfD, which is sympathetic to Russia, was being unfairly treated. Kall said that the campaign involved videos falsely claiming that ballots in the eastern city of Leipzig had been sent out without the AfD on them.

Other false videos, purportedly from the northern city of Hamburg, showed what were said to be ballots for the AfD being thrown in a shredder, he said.

Local election officials quickly worked out the videos were disinformation, Kall added. The AfD, second in the polls on around 20 percent, has been accused of having links to Moscow and has called for Germany to end its military support for Ukraine. Germany´s mainstream parties have long pledged not to cooperate with the AfD, leading the far-right party to accuse their rivals of freezing them out of the democratic process.